


the colors of us

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (temporary but it's still there), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Background Relationships, Businessman Gladiolus Amicitia, Dancing, Established Relationship, Fireworks, First Meetings, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Fanart, Inspired by Music, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Meet the Family, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Piercings, Regret, Suit Porn, Tattoo Artist Ignis Scientia, Tattoos, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-05-15 02:23:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14781845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Gladio runs a sprawl of a business conglomerate. Ignis is a talented artist who works in ink, steel, and (occasionally) needle and thread.They love each other to bits and pieces, even when their jobs take up most of their waking hours: they make time to be together.





	1. spectrum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WildIxia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildIxia/gifts).



> Ignis in these chapters is based on [THIS](https://wildixia.tumblr.com/post/170625301095/tattoos-piercings-vibrant-color-and-our-birthday).
> 
> Gladio in these chapters is based on [THIS](https://wildixia.tumblr.com/post/172080570140/business-au-mr-amicitia-will-i-ever-give).
> 
> Go give the artist lots of love please :)
> 
> \-----
> 
> Originally posted to my FFXV Tumblr [HERE](https://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/tagged/colors-of-us-au).

“All right, that’s the fourth time, you’re last in again,” he hears Aranea say, when the fifth and last chime cuts through the conversational buzz on the teleconference line. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“What are you picking on me for, I’m right on time,” is Noctis’s reply, and he sounds both outraged and sleepy, mostly because he doesn’t muffle his mic in time, and they can all hear him yawn.

“That’s contagious!” is Cindy’s complaint -- followed by the sound of her own yawn, which is blessedly cut off before it can spread even further.

Ignoring the byplay as he has done for the last few minutes, Gladio checks his watch and reaches for the bottle of wine on the desk. He’s been leaving the red out to breathe, and now he can pour into the tumbler next to his tablet, next to the remote for the flatscreen TV on the near wall of his office. The flow of emails is finally slowing down, and he switches his attention between the messages from Iris and from Talcott, and the global stocks tickers in their constant crawling scroll. 

“Can we call this meeting to order?” And that’s Lunafreya, and all the others immediately go quiet; so does Gladio. Swallow of wine -- rich notes of oak and woodsmoke on his tongue -- and he swipes out of his email app and pulls up a document full of notes instead. “Thank you. Good to talk to everyone again. As of this very minute we have four weeks to the summit, so if you haven’t already switched over to crisis mode, this is your actual reminder to do so. Get your lists sorted and in order, everyone, because I promise you we’ll be clocking up the overtime.”

“And we actually do this on such a regular basis we’re fucking crisis experts now, why do we volunteer for this shit, or why do we get volunteered for this shit,” Noctis mutters.

“Because we’re damn good at it,” and Aranea snorts, raising a chorus of sighs and groans and put-upon sounds in response.

And Gladio drinks more wine. Keys on his mic, and says, “Okay, so, motivation is what we need, right? I got some for you: the sooner we get through these meetings, the sooner we can get to the summit and then when it’s over, we can all get blind drunk.”

“Right, and it’s your turn to host us again,” Lunafreya says. “If you’re talking about providing motivation, I have one request. Please tell me you still have some of that wine we were drinking, the last time we were around to one of those places of yours.”

“An entire cellarful,” he promises. “And more where it came from. I know how these things tend to go.”

“Unfortunately we all do,” she groans. “If you’ve got that wine on hand then I’m good to go. Shall we get started?” she asks, before launching into a rundown of confirmations.

“Keynotes,” he hears Cindy say, next. “You want the good news first or the bad news first?”

“Ugh, bad news first,” Aranea says.

He rolls his eyes and mutters along with the others, and the meeting drones on in its brisk pace -- and then he suddenly hears the quiet chime that means someone’s coming into the loft, and he runs his eyes over the clutter of his desk. Hits the mute button three times to make sure he’s not audible to the rest of the conference call, before looking over his shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting you back for another hour or so. Is everything all right?”

Lean shape contorting and flexing, and the pad of bare feet through the semi-darkness of the loft. Smells of sweat and petrichor and salt on the breeze, all undercut by the bitter base note of permanent ink. “Believe it or not, it was a good day.”

Gladio switches the lamp on his desk on.

Fair skin like a canvas for washes of vivid startling color: and Gladio feels lucky, once again, to be able to lay eyes on those colors, on the play of wiry muscles in a deceptively slender frame on show. Lavender-pale boxer shorts and a white waistband, the glint of pearl-white buttons on the fly, and glitter of light caught and held in accents of gleaming metal.

This is Ignis, then, this is the exterior of him, the canvas he’s made of himself. Light-brown hair gone sweat-dark at the roots, and strands clinging to his temples. The frames of his ever-present eyeglasses dangling from his mouth by one black-plastic temple tip. His clothes in a bundle in his hand, and the black-and-green gleam of his painted toenails, which hang easily to the floor as Ignis hitches himself noiselessly onto the desk, right next to the speakers where the others are still conducting the meeting.

Gladio smiles up at him, and cherishes the small laugh that he gets in return -- and that’s more than enough reason to beckon him closer, close enough that he can kiss the arch of an eyebrow, and the studs outlining the end of that arch are warm.

In Ignis’s other hand is his smartphone: as Gladio watches, he opens one of the instant-messaging apps and starts typing. _Pay attention to your meeting. You’re supposed to be listening to them._

He smiles, and loosens the knot on his tie, and offers the tumbler of wine in exchange for the phone. It only takes a minute to erase the draft message, and to type in his own: _We don’t need to go over the same ground again; we finished talking about what I’m doing this year in one of the other calls. I only have to pay attention because the summit’s taking place here. Mostly all I have to do is make sure they’re all capable of functioning for a week._

Wine-stain on Ignis’s mouth, a vivid addition to all the colors he’s already wearing. _Hosting duties, then. I see._

He watches as Ignis reaches for the wine bottle, and this time he pours till the tumbler’s three-quarters full, and all that wine vanishes down his throat in the space of a moment. “Hey.” Not quite concern in his voice.

“Like I said. It was a good day. So I’m not drinking to forget anything.” Ignis’s whisper, that never fails to thrill Gladio. “But finish your meeting, and then perhaps we can talk about it. I’m sure it’ll keep.”

“ _I_ can’t.” He catches at Ignis’s hand, then.

And fails, because Ignis slips out of his grasp with a quiet laugh, and walks away, and somehow he’s got his clothes and his phone in one hand, and the wine bottle and the tumbler in the other, and he’s vanishing into the rest of the loft. 

So Gladio swears, and laughs, and tunes back in, just in time for Noctis to clear his throat, and finish with his updates: “…and whoever thought it was a good idea to schedule this particular summit for the rainy season ought to get taken out back and shot.”

He rolls his eyes at the jibe. “We didn’t pick the time, remember, that’s all them, all those important shits coming here,” he says. “Anyway we shouldn’t be complaining, it’s not like we’re going to get rained on at all. We’ll be indoors where we don’t have to worry about weather and shit like that. Only thing we’ll have to worry about would be your flights getting out of here, if at that.”

“That’s exactly what I was afraid of,” Noctis groans.

“That leaves you, Gladio,” he hears Lunafreya say, cutting through the quiet grumble of the other man.

“Holding down the fort here,” and he makes a note to personally review the various reservations and contingency plans. “And I have a few tricks up my sleeve in case the gods decide to try and fuck us over.”

“Good. At least one thing’s going well. Any other matters at this time?”

“None from me,” he says, and his words are echoed by the others.

He thinks he’s not imagining her sigh, that sounds a little like relief. “Then we’ll move the next meeting up. Ten days from now, same time. Thank you, everyone.”

And he can finally get to his feet and stretch, and he pulls his suit jacket off. Discards his tie next to the remote control. Shakes his hair out of its sleek tail. Slides his feet out of his boots.

His working day is finally done, and he’s going to have to start the whole process over again in a little less than seven hours, and he leaves the flatscreen TV on and silently flickering. Leaves the tablet behind, too, and he quickens his pace as he moves through the loft.

Straight up the stairs to the sprawl of the single bedroom, the sweep of windows and the star-filled night outside, the view of the living space in its night-hued shroud and -- he hesitates, torn, as always, between the soft sweet ache and the sharp edge of need.

He’ll be the first to admit he’d bought the loft purely for the convenience of having an address in the very center of this city, from which he runs the business empire that he and Iris and Talcott have all inherited from their fathers in their own long-standing partnership. A loft he could lend out if needed to people like Noctis, who’s practically his other blood brother. A manicured place, the furniture set out like a display in an upscale department store, the bed and the chairs and the desks nothing more but embellishments. 

But the bed, tonight, in its luxurious sprawl, low to the polished glass-like material of the floor in its translucent panes: the bed is covered in sheets the color of the wine still remaining in the tumbler on the nightstand. Two types of pillows: memory foam to rest the head on, and then fluffy cloud-puffs to hold on to. 

And on those sheets, on those pillows, the shape of Ignis, the lines of him, where he’s sleeping right on top of the bed.

The colors of him, bright stark compelling, and the warm flush in his skin, as though he’s been sleeping here for a thousand nights, for a thousand years, a plainly beautiful form laid out for privileged eyes to see. 

Gladio sets his own clothes aside and allows himself this time, this quiet moment.

Ignis: the canvas of him, the rich ornamentation of him. Right arm flung out to the side, the better to display the foliage and the flowers of him, the organic beauty of the forms that make up the intricacies of the sleeve-tattoo that he wears, the same sleeve that had drawn Gladio’s attention in the first place. Lace of living forms, twining up and down his arm. Roses in their dizzying whorls of petal-glory, no two blossoms alike, connected one to the other by thorn-studded vines.

On his back, below the left shoulder-blade: a fantastic cat-like creature with a complicated pattern of spots, intricate detail of its tail and its paws and its eyes. The tendrils fanning out around the snarl of it, whip-lines that could almost be moving with the shift of his breathing, the shift of his muscles as he seems to settle in further in his sleep. Sparks of lightning trailing from the tendrils, as if the creature were breathing out that power, that primal energy. The way it’s curled in wary lines, the way it’s positioned in its forever-crouch, and Gladio knows why it’s placed where it is, why it’s posed as it is.

It’s the guardian of Ignis’s heart. 

And Gladio almost hesitates, but he reaches out anyway, for Ignis’s right wrist: startling connection, there, the vital pulse of him, and -- barely a moment for him to hold on to that living warmth and that leashed power before Ignis shivers, languidly, and opens his eyes.

Green eyes, green like a thousand secret gardens in their vine-robed walls, green like forests of legend and myth and the cat-like guardian, whose eyes match Ignis’s, almost exactly.

Green, and Gladio nods, makes the decision on the instant. Says, “I think I’ll take you up on your offer.”

Blink. Blink.

Ignis unfurls, or uncoils -- he rises from the bed and his whole face is lit up with wonder, and his voice rasps with the interruption to his sleep, and is lovely and even and rich anyway. No tell-tale of reproach in the brief words: “Tell me.”

“As long as it’s you doing it, then, yeah, let’s do it,” Gladio murmurs, between kisses, and the thrill of Ignis sparking to life beneath his hands, warming, kissing him back so it’s a wrench for him to pull away. But he does that and he taps at his own left ear: where there’s one single piercing through the lobe, and the rest of it is a pristine shape that he’d like to offer up, so he guides Ignis’s fingertips in a different direction, over the top of the shell. “How many studs, I leave it up to you entirely. As long as they’re in green. Like your eyes, or maybe a little bit darker.”

And his reward is the spark and the smile and the weight of Ignis in his lap, and he runs his hands down Ignis’s sides, and pulls him straight into his lap -- thrill of answering laughter, low thrum of Ignis’s words in his bones, responding: “I know you have, ah, discerning tastes. So I’ll be careful to find you something you’ll truly like.”

“Got that right here,” he says, and kisses him.


	2. heart of colors, heart of courage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration for this chapter taken from [sakura](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWo72AHsamc) by NIRGILIS.

He jolts himself out of sleeping like he’s falling off a cliff, like he’s taking the brunt of a hard blow, and it almost hurts to blink himself awake: the corners of his eyes are sticky and gritty at the same time, and there is a low pounding throb of pain in his temples that he thinks must grow stronger and more insistent with every reluctantly-waking breath. Whirl of his jumbled thoughts and the sour aftertaste of too much wine on his tongue, like barbs hooked into the back of his throat, like an ache in his teeth that he can’t pry out because he can’t even swallow properly -- so he gropes for something else to drink and there’s all of a half-swallow of water left in the nearest glass, flat and tasting of dust and he gulps it down like it’s cool spring water. 

He tries to make sense of the world around him, starting with: where is he anyway? And the walls are covered in wood-grain and draped fabric, the lacy arabesques of white and gray, and -- slowly he recognizes the shapes of the couches and the armchairs, all pulled together into a ragged circle, all huddled around a low long table.

He recognizes the things strewn across the table, too: the welter of laptops and tablets and smartphones, the bright neon-shouts of charging cables and external batteries. Empty bowls and plates. Cutlery and crumbs on nearly every horizontal surface, and the actual evidence of what they’d done, last night. Bottles and all kinds of glasses, some of them turned over, some of them lying on their sides, and he slowly comes to the conclusion that this time they’ve all gotten lucky, this time, because there’s not a broken thing in the room that he can see.

He scrapes at his hopelessly stubbled cheeks, and his fingertips come away covered with bits and pieces of last night’s dinner -- that he can’t even remember, what had they all managed to cram down their throats? Did they at least had actual food to eat? The plates on the table are no help at all -- and with the other hand he tries to press soothing circles into his own forehead, but to no avail.

So he looks around and tries to see if the others are all right, and -- he does see them all here, all sleeping.

Cindy and Aranea curled up together against an ottoman upholstered in the same colors as the drapery on the walls, suit jackets gone somewhere Gladio can’t even see, gold-blonde hair and silver-white tangled beyond saving, and the two of them tangled in each other’s arms. 

At least Lunafreya’s made it to a couch, and she’s draped over the girl that she’d introduced last night as her lover, home on leave from the armed forces and generous enough to spend some time working with them for all that -- what’s her name? Crowe, he thinks, Crowe who wears her dark hair in tight braids, that are still intact despite the fact that she’s out cold too. 

And on the floor next to the table: Noctis and his Prompto. This is the first time Gladio’s ever envied Noctis his ability to sleep anywhere and in any situation, because he looks thoroughly comfortable where he’s laid flat-out full-length just inches away from clusters of forks and knives and a lopsided stack of plates. Quiet snores issuing from his open mouth, or is that Prompto, curled halfway on top of him? Their suits are even still mostly intact, except for how they’re both inexplicably missing their ties.

And that leaves him, pointedly the seventh wheel, and he presses his hand over his heart, because the twinge in his chest of worry -- and yes, being alone -- isn’t something he’s imagining at all. 

He remembers being alone, as he ran around the scenes of last night’s gala, as he worked through the nitty-gritty of the production and the coordination, side by side with the others -- and the all-too-brief respite of Ignis’s presence, for all of forty-five minutes over the tail-end of the welcoming cocktails.

The thing is, Gladio also remembers telling Ignis, several times, not to go to the gala at all. He’d done so point-blank to the man’s face, and he’d sent a flurry of messages to the same effect, too, and all of that only because Ignis’s single living blood relative, his Aunt Camelia who’d practically had the raising of him, has been in the hospital for the past month or so.

In the here and now, Gladio winces, remembering the shudder of the word Ignis had used to identify the surgical procedure she’d had to undergo: a lobectomy. These days people don’t have to suffer through getting their ribs cracked open so that surgeons can go in and take out a portion of their lungs, but the thought terrifies him anyway, as does the idea of little robots getting into his body to do the same thing -- this is why he gave up smoking years ago, he thinks, this is why he complains so much about Iris’s occasional smoke breaks. COPD and worse, and the pain of a constant wracking cough: he’s seen the signs in Ignis’s aunt, seen her brought down low by a simple change in the weather.

But Camelia’s supposed to be recovering now, from that procedure and from the long years of her condition, and he shares Ignis’s hopes that she’ll get out of the whole ordeal and live longer, live better, and Ignis had wanted to go to the gala to celebrate that recovery, except for the shock of the hospital calling in the middle of the afternoon, just as he was planning to close up shop early.

Gladio can still hear, can still remember, the barely-suppressed worry in Ignis’s voice, and the news relayed from the hospital: missing minders, and the sudden onset of a low-grade fever.

Hence going to the tattoo shop to tell Ignis not to go to the gala, and hence the flurry of texts and emails and IMs.

He hopes to never see Ignis look like he had, standing isolated in the corner of the tattoo shop, anguish scrawled into his face in terrible broad strokes. Enough to blot out the colors of his ink, the colors of his piercings, to turn all of the colors that he wears on his skin garish and horrific against his green-leaf eyes bruised with shock.

And Gladio’d called one of his own company cars, Gladio’d bundled Ignis out the door and heading in the wrong direction across the city, and Gladio’d endured the dinner-and-drinking tedium of the trade conference’s gala night with only that brief glimpse of him in the shop, and him jittering over an untouched cocktail, to keep Gladio’s heart and mind going.

Ignis hadn’t even been wearing a suit as he held on to that rocks glass with a trembling hand: not even the suit that he’d designed for himself under Gladio’s own surprised eyes, revealing another talent and another facet of the endless creative spirit of him. The suit that had been spread out on another worktable in the tattoo shop, seams trailing dark thread and a single steel-glint of a needle, that he must have been working on all the way to the moment when the evening was shattered by the unexpected phone call.

Gladio remembers taking the glass from him, and remembers kissing him gently, between the doors into the hotel and the door into the car that was idling on the driveway -- and he remembers telling the driver exactly where he was going. 

Now there are messages on Gladio’s smartphone, the last of them sent far too early in the morning for his own comfort, but that’s nothing when the words are full of relief: _She’s resting easy. She’s out of the woods and on the mend. We have located my missing cousins, and Aunt Camelia promised to give them several sharp pieces of her mind. I am -- too tired to go anywhere else. Please expect me at your apartment tomorrow afternoon._

It’ll be today’s afternoon in an hour or so, Gladio reflects in the here and now: and he forces himself to his feet at last, grunting when his knees wobble and small wonder, since he’s not had to get up off the floor of some hotel room in years, not even a room as nice as this one. One final message in this particular iteration of the group chat: _So we got through that one okay. Yay team and all that. And now I refuse to talk to any of you for another week or so. Good work everyone, let’s get this out of our systems and get out of each other’s sights for a bit. You guys are seriously the best._

He closes the door as quietly as he can manage, and still winces at the thump that doesn’t really carry in the richly carpeted corridors. No luggage to retrieve or anything -- he lives in this very same city, after all -- but there are things that still need doing, and so he stops at the front desk. Credit card to the manager on duty so he can sign over a preemptively large tip. Phone call to his own offices so he can get somebody to drive him home. 

Last but not the least, he stops at the flower shop in the hotel lobby, and orders a large arrangement of peonies in their ruffles and their bright sweet scents, and gives Camelia’s hospital room as the delivery address.

Back to the loft, and --

All the thought in his mind is for a cup of tea to soothe him to sleep, if he can remember where he’d last stashed the loose-leaf stuff.

He stumbles through the door and up the staircase and -- blinks.

He’s been here before.

Been here before, staring at the beauty spread out on his bed, sleeping.

And all the glorious colors emblazoned onto Ignis’s skin, all his pride and all his art in the lines that he’d designed and had inked into his limbs, all of that is covered, all of that has vanished, under the cover of -- the exact suit that he was supposed to have worn to last night’s event. The severe tailoring of the suit jacket, that had been meant to cling lovingly to the lines of him, in black wool and the overlay of dense black lace. Beneath the jacket, the glimpse of rebellious color in the form of the night-purple shirt. The gorgeous absurdity of those long legs in sinfully fitted black suit trousers. Bare feet to sleep on the bed.

The piercings, too, have been made over, so they harmonize with the night-gleam of his clothes and the bright bright fittings, and every single bead instead catches the late-morning sunlight in dome-rock black.

Gladio’s only thankful he’s gone straight upstairs: the thought of that cup of tea flies clean out of his mind as he hurriedly strips down to his naked skin, to his own piercings decorating his ear in a silver-shining arc, and to the new ink decorating his shoulders and the upper half of his back -- the beginnings of a feline predator, but for its languid laying pose an exact match to the wary creature adorning Ignis’s back, watching over his heart.

He remembers breathing calm and yielding beneath Ignis’s hands for each of those sessions. The adrenaline rush of the piercings and their jade-green beads. The quiet sure whine of the tattoo machine tracing across his skin. 

He all but falls into the pillows and -- Ignis is asleep, he must be, because his eyes are closed and his breathing remains deep and even, but Ignis turns unerringly towards him like a magnet to its opposite pole. Ignis turns toward him and pulls him close and breathes quietly and Gladio clutches him closer. Kisses the only part of him he can reach, the only part of him carefully bared -- the hollow of his throat -- and the last thing on his mind before sleep envelopes him, like a welcome outlaw (Ignis is his favorite welcome outlaw), is the black velvet box he’s keeping in one of the locked drawers in his closet.

(And that’s something for a day in the future, something he doesn’t have a schedule for, in his regimented life that follows the workings of the business day as it starts and ends all over the world. A day in the future that he’s not planning to rush. The right opportunity will come when it comes and he’ll be patient. He knows how to wait for it. 

(Because inside the black velvet box is a wide plain band in copper-burnished gold. The gold of the wedding rings that his parents had worn all their lives, the gold that they’d passed on to him and that he’d asked Iris’s permission to reuse, to have melted down and remade. 

(A wide plain band, sized to fit Ignis’s left middle finger exactly.)


	3. passionate hues

When Ignis moves, when he can bring himself to move again, it’s for no more than a breath -- a needed breath, too bright and too fierce and nothing at all that could calm the mad tripped-wire beat of his heart.

His heart, wound around and sweetly pierced in thorns, in vines, desire and something deeper, something more intense, twisting into shapes like the ones he wears so proudly on his skin: sharp edges piercing him through to his very soul.

And with a pain that almost tears him in two, he wrenches himself away from that sight, that unexpected gift: Gladiolus in the cast-off pieces of a suit, laid out flat on a bed that creaks, a bed that’s too narrow even for Ignis himself on the nights when he’s sleeping curled up and worn out.

Into the shower, and the cool water doesn’t scour away the sight of Gladiolus, just him, simply him, despite the skewed tie and the crumpled trousers. The boots thrown into the corner, the suit jacket left slumped and disconsolate over a rickety chair, the scatter of sleek black devices on the cracked table next to the bed.

The monument of him, lovingly chiseled musculature and the breadth of his form; the way he sleeps, heavy, needful, that too is branded into Ignis’s mind: on his stomach, heedless of the world that churns on outside the windows, inside the temporarily dark screens of his phones and his tablet. The way he seems to have turned away from those constant tugging reminders, and the way he occupies the scant real estate of the bed, as though Ignis’s cramped top-floor flat is his refuge from everything and everyone else, from his breakneck cutthroat world, that seems to always be demanding his full attention.

Hurrying through the end of one day, even as the clock in the corridor chimes reluctantly to signal midnight and the sullen hours in the beginning of another, and Ignis curses the dripping water that chills the back of his neck, and he throws off his towel as soon as he can decently lock the door behind him and now he only has to cross to the bed, and he almost hesitates to touch Gladiolus, to interrupt his sleep.

But his hand, still shadowed in the inkstains of his day, the inkstains of his chosen art, drifts as if magnetically drawn to that elegant shoulder, those curling lengths of dark hair -- and he knows how to touch other people, it’s only one of the things he’s learned and honed through the years, he knows he’s keeping his fingertips from making full contact with the man sleeping in his bed -- the last thing he wants is to wake him, when he seems so lost in the sleep that he needs --

“Ignis.”

A breath, a gentle soft sound, and Ignis can’t hide the hitch in his breath -- so he takes off his eyeglasses and leans in to kiss the nearest bit of Gladiolus he can reach, which is the back of his hand. Old scars crisscrossing the knuckles. “So you weren’t sleeping, after all. You could have fooled me.”

“I _was_ sleeping,” is the slow sweet response. “I was, and then I heard you. Felt you. Doesn’t matter. I knew you were here.”

He laughs, softly, watching as Gladiolus takes off the rest of his clothes, watching the ink on his skin appear from its shrouds and covers. “You’re joking, aren’t you? I know how to be quiet. And I was being so.”

“You’re stealthy, yeah, but -- like I said. I knew you were here. And I refuse to miss a moment of you.” Smile, that curves that lovely mouth and its frame of immaculately trimmed mustache and beard.

“My apologies for interrupting your rest, then. Heaven knows you need it. Your days are long and unkind.” He gives in to that lovely temptation, and he gets into the bed and hauls Gladiolus close. He carefully spans the breadth of those shoulders, carefully runs his hands over his own work: the great hunting cat in its spots and in its long lash of a tail.

The tattoo is almost done, he thinks. It’s almost alive, with the ripple of muscle and skin. Busy days and stolen nights for the work of ink and needles: but if he can persuade Gladiolus to set aside one day for the tattoo itself, and one to rest in, then it will be enough. It will have to be enough. Time to finish off the bared fangs and the watchful eyes and the massive paws.

“If it’s you waking me up, I don’t mind.”

And Gladiolus is turning around in his arms: and the smile, sweet and fierce, is all the warning he gets, before the kiss, before the overwhelming smash and the welcome overpowering presence of him, and Ignis keens and presses closer, closer somehow, as if to find all the nearly nonexistent gaps between them and then to bridge them. To fill himself up with Gladiolus, to willingly disappear into him, just for this moment, this stolen midnight -- 

He feels himself being pressed back into his smashed-flat pillows, and he blinks and then cries out, shocked again, as Gladiolus kisses a blazing trail down his throat, down to his shoulder -- sharp bright pain of teeth closing in his flesh and Ignis all but falls to pieces just on that one sensation alone -- and he growls, “Don’t you dare stop.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” he thinks he hears, between fresh bites: and he cries out every time, shameless encouraging, till he knows, till he feels, that he wears a garden of roses on his skin but Gladiolus seems intent on turning him into a garden of wanton bruises, the sucking heavy pressure of mouth and tongue, every mark, every trace of pleasure, laid out plainly to his -- their -- eyes.

Gladiolus, whispering: “Don’t hold back, I want to hear you, I need to hear you, tell me what you want -- ”

“Have me, do whatever you want with me,” is all he can say, all he can ask for -- he’s nothing but the burn, lit up by Gladiolus and his marauding mouth, his wandering hands: his lover playing him so well and so thoroughly. The shiver in his skin is the only possible response to someone who knows him so profoundly, like they’ve been loving each other all these years, like they’ve been wanting each other all their lives --

Lives of this, lifetimes upon lifetimes, he thinks, and he cries out, “Gladiolus!”

“Wait for it,” is the response, sharp bright rash promise. “Want to make it good for you.”

And Ignis’s eyes fly open, and he looks down: catches him in that last waiting precipice of an instant, the careful knowing smile that is the prelude to Gladiolus going down on him, all the lines in his face drawn together in deep ecstasy, deep concentration, and then he feels the flick of that wicked talented tongue against him and he all but collapses, all but flies apart, and there’s nothing to do but hold on. Hold on to Gladiolus and try to hold out, one hand in dark hair, and the other to the inked lines wandering across one broad shoulder -- 

And it gets to the point where he tugs on Gladiolus’s hair, too harsh, too rough, surprised grunt against his skin and he opens his mouth to apologize, to try and make things better --

Gladiolus’s voice, nothing more than a needy rasp, stops him: “Fuck, that was good.”

“Oh,” is all Ignis can say, then.

“Do it again if you like.”

So he laughs, breathless still, unsteady still, and he says, “I would rather do something else.”

“Going to have to wait for it. I don’t want to let you up. Not done yet,” he hears Gladiolus say. “Not planning to be done. Not for a while.”

He groans, then, he actually groans, torn between anticipation and pure need. “Plan? You? If I know you, perhaps I may not even survive this night,” he begins.

The kiss is a beautiful interruption, knowing exactly where Gladiolus has just been -- the thrill shakes through him, the taste of his own need heavy on his tongue, beautiful violent filthy --

“That’s the start of it,” he hears Gladiolus say.

He laughs and laughs and gives in. Gives himself over.


	4. colorway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line of poetry quoted in this chapter is the full English-language translation of a _waka_ written by Izumi Shikibu, and translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani.

“Early today,” he murmurs, and he reaches into one of the cabinets in the corner of the room. Cleansing wipes, scentless, soft white material that he uses to scrub the chair in its oddly intricate frame of metalwork and leather cushions, and he pulls it out into the proper configuration to accommodate this morning’s first appointment. Wide seat, and a U-shaped cushion to lean forward into, and the girl who seats herself in the chair sheds her dark-blue shirt, no shiver of apprehension in her movements.

Wide line of the bandeau around her chest, that exposes her shoulders to him and the lines of his work in progress. Letters in a faux-handwritten font, spill of verses onto dark-brown skin, and it’s not her first tattoo, and the poetry seems to complement the raven in its full-throated cry, silent and vigilant where it occupies the meat of her left upper arm: _Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house._

The line is a half-complete sketch of outlines and line variation and the little flourishes to imitate the girl’s actual handwriting; he’s still surprised he got to the end of the line in one single session, and, he remembers, so had the girl.

Second session, today, and he’s thinking about doing all the shading if he can -- and if not, he’ll settle for the important words in the verse. _Wind_ and _moonlight_ and _house_ , and the rest of the words in simpler strokes.

So he scrubs his hands and his chosen tools clean, and puts on a pair of gloves, and only after he’s ready does he lean toward the girl and ask, gently, “Will you need a moment?”

“I’m good,” the girl says, the words only a little muffled by the leather of the chair. “I took your advice. Two extra-strength paracetamol before I got here.”

“Then let’s begin.”

Ink bottles in a handful of bright shades. The quiet well-maintained whine of the tattoo machine. It’s easy to correct for the first time the girl flinches, the first contact of needles against skin; and after the third flinch she stops moving. Falls into the quiet euphoria that he knows only too well, that he half-craves even as he causes her to drift in it.

Movement out of the corners of his eyes: Nyx, the beads in his braids and the paper bags in his hands announcing his presence; and the silent shadow of Cor. Between the three of them they own the shop free and clear, and he’s often grateful for the fact that they haven’t all tried to kill each other in this business partnership -- as grateful as he is that they’ve become his friends, which is really more than he can say when they’d been total strangers to him on the first meeting. 

He gets as far as the word _ruined_ before the girl holds up both hands and says, softly, “It’s too much.”

Hands in his peripheral vision before he can sit up straight, hands moving past him to offer the girl a box of fruit juice with the straw already stuck into the top, and a bright-green gel capsule. “Slowly.” The voice of Cor, low and commanding. “Drink before you take the painkiller.”

“Thank you.” 

Ignis braces himself on the table on which the tattoo machine is mounted, and his knees creak warningly as he gets to his feet, as he crosses back into the inner room of the shop and Nyx is trying to eat a carton of noodles with his chopsticks in the wrong hand, because he’s also trying to scroll through something on his smartphone and Ignis rolls his eyes and accepts the offer of a jam doughnut with grace. 

“That’s yours for the day, right? No one else coming in?” Nyx says, after a moment. “It’s your month to do the books.”

“They’re half-done already, I’m just going to check the math.” He licks at the corner of his mouth, chasing a blob of blueberry jam before it drips off onto his shirt. “And then I’ve got that commission to work on.”

“New? When did it come in?”

“Two weeks ago. Gladio’s friend’s boyfriend.”

“Complicated,” he hears Nyx snicker.

Cor passes him a small envelope in red-and-gold paper. “Tip.”

Ignis waves it away. “Put it in common cash.”

“Must be nice to have a very rich boyfriend,” and Cor is chuckling, openly, as he chooses a doughnut from the box on the table. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know, Mr We’re-Not-Idle-Rich,” he snorts, and goes to make himself a cup of tea, taking the carton of milk from the small refrigerator behind the desk to do so.

He responds to their middle-finger salutes in kind once he’s freed up both of his hands, and keeps on laughing even as he settles down with the shop laptop to look through the month’s cash and expenses.

Cor rises from the table after another half-hour or so, and Ignis feels rather than hears the thump of the music that arises from their shared workroom, and he shrugs back when Nyx says, “That guy on the afternoon soap opera. TV actor somebody.”

He sweeps the remains of breakfast away when Nyx leaves. Now he can spread his things out over the table, and he pulls out his sketchbooks and the battered roll-up case in which he keeps his pens and pencils, and he forgets to think about time, about the cramped desk, about the bass-beat of Cor’s music, as he fills page after page with detailed landscapes. Sea-views, and mountain ranges in their crooked peaks, and the intricate skylines of cities that have never existed except in the back of his mind: they’re good practice, he thinks, as he gradually switches from skyscraper-forms to -- wings.

Dragon-wings of membrane and claw and the bones shaped like wicked-edged mutations of his own hand. Bird-feathers in flocks and flight-paths. After a moment he switches to a fresh page, and for some reason he thinks about circuitry, about labyrinths made in solder and right angles, and -- then he blinks and the page is sporting a pair of angel-wing shapes made from the inner workings of a computer, or of his smartphone, and -- the only consideration is to check to see if he hasn’t inadvertently been too inspired by the art of some of his favorite creators.

He’s still scrolling through some of his bookmarked galleries when he hears and feels the step coming closer, the weight that makes the floor creak in warning, and he’s half-expecting Cor -- 

Subdued paisley in the lining of a suit jacket, multitude of reds hidden in sober navy-blue, and he blinks, pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and the person sitting next to him, sunglasses and long hair and the smell of summer-river flow on the move, is still Gladiolus -- who smiles at him, and says in a very low voice, “Sorry. Don’t let me disturb you.”

“What are you doing here?” But even as he says it he knows he’s reaching for another lead holder, and he’s starting on another series of circuit boards. 

“Playing hooky. Only not really. I’m working, I’m just not at the office.”

“By coming into mine,” he teases, and he chuckles, sticks his tongue out at the paper he’s sketching on, when Gladiolus laughs softly.

“Yeah.”

“Carry on then,” he says, and the diagram-like sketch beneath his hands turns into something like the shape of a flightless bird, something that makes him think of racing over hilly terrain, of fording rough swollen rivers.

“That the thing Prompto said he was looking into?”

“I don’t know yet. I imagine I’ll find out when you do,” he says, and he’s not really thinking any more. He’s letting his hands do the work. Letting his mind range freely: and Gladiolus hums next to him, and he’s a warm solid presence, anchoring him here.

He doesn’t even have the heart to pretend to be annoyed when Nyx walks back in and laughs, finding him sitting back-to-back with Gladiolus, the two of them working quietly, in opposite directions, together.


	5. a veil of jet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Flashback chapter! How did they meet?)

He can still hear the laughter and the undignified snorts, and he still has the urge to flip off -- well, not the smartphone on Lunafreya’s desk because he’s not in Lunafreya’s office, but in his mind he can still hear the others laughing, Aranea and Cindy and Noctis, because of all the times to lose a coin toss -- of all the times for Lunafreya’s obsession with coffee to rear its head -- 

He smoothes his hand over the back of his head. He tries to swallow, tries to get his ears to pop, vertigo and the close silent shivering crackle of lightning on the rise needling at him, and he’s jittering on the street like he’s the one who’s been mainlining coffee, and he clenches his hands into fists and takes a deep breath. Another. Another. It won’t be enough to calm him. The entire contents of his hip flask won’t be enough to calm him. So he doesn’t waste the swallow and he doesn’t waste his time with swearing -- he just walks and he prays for the clouds to hold off for just a few more minutes, just a little while longer, and the steel-and-glass-bound blocks of the central business district unroll around him, beneath him, as he turns a corner and then makes his way through a crowded intersection, and he doesn’t look into the faces that hurry with him and past him and around him.

He doesn’t press his hand over his heart, over the dome-shaped glitter of the unfigured jet that he’s wearing in his lapel: three years now, this past weekend, and the time’s nowhere near enough to even begin recovering from the grief, from the loss, and he gives in at last to the need to reach out, and he pulls out his smartphone and fires off a message to the private group chat: _You two better remember to take care of yourselves._

 _thanks bro. you too._ Flip of ellipses on the move, that turns into Talcott’s usual sign-off -- a little cartoony image of a cactus in a blue pot.

 _hanging in there. love you._

He nods, once, to himself. Repeats Iris’s words quietly, because they’re the thought he wants to hang on to, even as he turns another corner and now the faded deep purple of the familiar awning swings into view: deep purple in the gloom of the day, startlingly vivid, and he makes his decision on the instant.

There’s no line at the till and he’s grateful for it. For the subdued hush and the smell of old books, the quiet chime of bells without melody, slim tubes of clear glass hung up in the doorway that he thinks must lead to the back of the shop. The woman who makes coffee in a gentle, almost contemplative rhythm, working next to the sleekly chromed machines, her dark hair gathered back in a severe crown-braid. 

“Tea,” he says, quietly, when he walks up to her, when she dusts her hands off on her spotless apron and whispers a welcome. “What do you have that smells like -- spring?”

“That is a long way from here,” the woman whispers. “But we might have something to help you think of it. Will you have it to go?”

“No.” He shakes his head, firmly. “I -- I’ll drink it here.”

She smiles, small and gentle and cool, and motions him towards the front of the shop, towards the sheer curtains in faded ivory hues and the cluster of armchairs. “I will bring you your tea in a moment.”

“Thanks.” Credit card, and a tip, and the chair he chooses to take is worn and soft and comfortable, and not squashy, not collapsing, and he exhales a long grateful breath -- even when the tears prick at the corner of his eye and he looks out the window-front and -- 

The sunlight fades away as he watches -- the wan pale wash of illumination on the street turns into cloud-heavy leaden mist, and then into rain, and he watches the flurrying rush of people on the sudden run, trying to escape the breaking storm -- rain that dances in the caprice of the shifting wind, sweeping first toward him and then away -- and he’s pleased to be indoors, pleased to be in a quiet and welcoming place, pleased to be alone with his thoughts and not, not anywhere on the verge of breaking down.

He thinks he feels a touch on his shoulder, and one on the top of his head: and he resolves to tell Iris, later. To tell Talcott. Maybe they’ll laugh at him, maybe not -- but he knows those touches, knows those hands being laid on him, and they’re a comfort, too, fleeting ghosts though they might be.

Rustle and click, approaching: the woman on her heels, apron over skirt, silver strands concentrated at her temples as she places a teapot and a large mug on the table next to him. 

Before he can murmur thanks, she’s already moving away, and that leaves him awash in the scent of delicate white, of double-flowered blossoms, like a phantom compound of sweet and sharp citrus, and he smiles and drinks the first sip, the second, thinking of petrichor and the scent of sage and the quiet laughter of his mother and of his father, the two of them working side by side, at a desk that was never meant to hold two sets of files, two briefcases.

Thunder, muttering, far over his head; flash of lightning that catches at him, that illuminates movement, just outside, just -- 

Gladio turns his head, then.

Umbrella, oversized, and all he can see of its wielder is rain-splashed jeans tucked into combat-style boots -- the umbrella’s on the move even as the person beneath it seems to be advancing right on him, the shape of its canopy as it’s turned this way and that, against the wind, against the muted roar of the downpour.

Leap, the last few feet to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, and the lightning-flash that catches on black spectacle-frames, on scratched lenses -- how can he see that, Gladio wonders, how can he notice that? Why is he riveted to the boots landing in a puddle and the person in the boots pretending to kick a spray of fallen leaves into the gutter? Why does he want to press his ear to the glass, and what is he hoping to hear -- 

The umbrella closes in a graceful sweep of movement and it reveals white streaks on the back of a dark blue windbreaker, the wide wide hood flung back to reveal -- inked lines, glitter of silver clinging to the entire upper arc of an ear, streaks of violent green in hair the brown and straw of butcher’s twine, like he sees in the kitchen of Iris’s flat -- 

He doesn’t press his ear to the glass, though it’s a near thing -- he taps his hand against that cool surface, instead, and the dull and quiet thump somehow carries through the rainstorm, somehow carries through the cry of the wind that he can see as it batters at the decorative trees down the road, and the man on the other side of the window starts, turns, slow movement of the windbreaker, of those wet boots, double-knotted shoelaces coming into view, dark henley and a frayed waistcoat --

The spectacles are a given, of course, Gladio’d already caught a glimpse of them -- so he’s caught and pinned on the eyes, instead: the eyes like all the greens of a garden awakening into spring, all the greens of leaf and bud and the promise of bright growth. 

Lightning-flash, and it catches on the piercings in the man’s eyebrows, the variously-placed hoops in the cartilage of his ears; it illuminates the lines curved against the man’s throat, ink twining into his skin, and with difficulty Gladio blinks --

He can’t quite tell himself to stop staring because he’s almost certain, like standing up and reaching out for a handshake to seal a deal certain, that the man is staring back. And what does he see, Gladio wonders? What does he see? His own pierced ears? His long hair? Stubble and the shadows in his face?

He says, or his mouth shapes the words: “Come in.”

Is it a question? Is it an invitation? Why of all the things -- 

The man on the other side of the window hesitates for a long moment, long enough for a fresh fan of lightning to split open the skies above, and then he’s breaking into graceful swift movement, and he’s reaching for the door.

Gladio’s getting to his feet and at the very last moment he catches sight of his tea, of the steam still rising from the spout of the teapot, and he pours the mug half-full and offers it to the man who’s come to a halt on the other side of the table. 

And it’s the brush of the man’s fingers against his own that almost drives him into a shiver -- the man’s fingers, and the incredible gentleness of him, when he says, “I am sorry for your loss.”

What -- how -- Gladio looks at his own jacket and then back at the man, who is holding on to the mug, chips and all, like it’s rare and precious and fragile. “Why do you know about mourning jewelry? It’s an, an old-fashioned thing.”

“I didn’t have any to wear, but I could ink it on.” Wiggle of the ring finger on the right hand: and Gladio nods, sadly, when he sees the skull spanning the space between the knuckle and the first joint.

“Three years ago,” he offers.

“Recent, then. It’s been seven years.” And the man finally sets the mug down. Finally reaches out with that same skull-marked right hand. “I don’t wish to burden you. I do want to thank you for the tea. For the invitation. I’m Ignis, Ignis Scientia.”

“Amicitia, Gladiolus,” Gladio murmurs, and takes Ignis’s hand, in a grasp that feels like the world tilting slowly and gently into a new and completely different configuration of rain-scent and silver and a soft and cool accent. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you -- Gladiolus.”


	6. illuminations

The road twists and turns and hairpins all the way to the summit of the hill and it’s a shame, Gladio thinks, a shame that he has to take his eyes off the shotgun seat and the profile of the man sitting in it -- the profile washed in the last golden rays of the setting summer sun. Stark slopes of nose and chin and mouth and cheek, and the hair that’s been tousled in the hours of seaside breezes and the smoky waft of city-street scents, the sudden and surprising transition from neon-lit ink and needles to an overnight bag and the sterile streamway of people running through airport corridors, and now they are all the way through from the coast and the city lights to rolling farmland-slopes, and the long marching meadows of purple-black flowers, the long marching alleyways of tall trees. Living trellises, living frameworks, and the thick and beautiful vines and runners draped onto those branches, and the intoxicating waft of sweet-sharp fragrance, piercing, only seeming to grow heavier as the bright countryside sunset gives way at last to the deep summer night.

Ignis is sitting next to him with his hands clenched into fists, with the ink on his skin gone monochrome with the faded light, with a dazed delighted smile that seems permanently fixed into the beautiful lines of his face, and Gladio feels that same bright joy in his heart, rippling through him, in sharp lovely waves.

 _Magical_ is the only word he can come up with, for these vast estates of farmland and orchard and the immense sweeping vistas of flowers, their scents nearly melting onto the back of his tongue, nearly catching in his throat with how they’ve suffused the air and the brisk evening winds. Magical, as they’ve always been, in these places where he’d spent his childhood and the long summers of being freed from schoolrooms and seminars and tutoring.

He’d whispered to Ignis of the welcome drop of feeling, like the earth itself being swept out from beneath him, leaving him falling and falling, into beauty, into memory and the actual awesome spectacle of the hills and gardens all around. 

Light-lines dividing the sky with brightness, side-to-side sweep, and distant as they are, they allow him to see the pencil-marks on Ignis’s fingertips and he smiles, remembering frantically sketched attempts to capture the quality of the light, the lines of vineyard and river and tree and even the ribboning silver of the road that still unspools before them -- although now that he’s crested the final set of hills, his objective is clearly in sight and -- he hopes he’s timed this right, because he doesn’t want to miss out on this night, the nights of falling towards summer, the nights of falling towards those rich seas of stars and bright skies -- 

“Fuck,” he thinks he hears Ignis say.

He can’t help but laugh, and stare, at the same time: knowing exactly what Ignis is looking at. 

Still a breathtaking sight.

Gladio’s been coming here for years and just like the impact of first arriving -- the impact of catching sight of the cathedral and its jagged-toothed walls, its futile attempts to contain the sky in its arches and vaults, never fails to move him to tears.

Roofless, doorless, its porches and transepts and aisles open to the skies, the ceilings and the magnificent spikes of its roofs long since torn away by time and wind and the merciless touch of the elements: the stones are crumbling, the stones are scattered in piles, and still the ancient beauty of the cathedral endures. 

And Gladio steers the car into the little courtyard that’s been fenced off for the purpose -- only a breath between the dying roar of the engine come to a halt, and the passenger-side door falling open, and he knows he sympathizes with Ignis’s quiet, stunned tears. 

Those eyes, looking on, seeing the people in their elegant suits and skirts and fluttering sleeves, streaming towards the exposed marble, the fallen remains of old pews. The sacristy and the choir and the radiating smaller spaces of what used to be chapels, grouped around a simple stone table placed on a pedestal of three steps.

“Gladio -- ”

He thinks he knows what the question might be. “Yeah. I’ve been coming here for years, and -- what’s the opposite of making a place holy? I don’t mean turning it into into hell. I mean, this place is not sacred, now, and that’s just a fact. This is -- secular?” He wonders if that’s the right word. “Ordinary people can use this space. Have been, since I was running around in shorts.”

That gets him a laugh. “I would have liked to have seen you as a child.”

“I was all over this place, when I wasn’t going to school,” he says, and he comes around and tucks Ignis into his side, and he won’t deny the thrill that still runs through him, the pleasure of Ignis’s arm fitting against the small of his back. “If I wasn’t running around and skinning my knees, I’d be -- riding every bike I could find.” There are still old old faded lines of scars in his lower legs, over his knees, piled on year after year, of falling off spindly rust-eaten frames. Memories of rough-pebbled roads and the taste of asphalt dust, baked to burning-hot in the sun.

“So that’s why you insisted on taking the bicycle tour.”

“I wanted to share it with you.”

Silence, and the warmth of Ignis’s cheek against his shoulder, pressing briefly. The contact is brief, but not the impact of him, that shakes through his limbs, that perches in his chest, spreading wings. “And this? This has nothing to do with bicycles.”

“Not like we’re dressed for it,” Gladio mutters, laughing a little. “This is something else. There are events to welcome the summer, and this is one of them.”

“Summer? When it’s still too cold in the mornings?” 

And he makes the same face that Ignis makes, something like a grimace, something like a silent complaint. 

“If you stay here till the dog days, you’ll miss the cold,” he teases. “But not this year.”

“No, I suppose not.”

He takes pleasure in watching Ignis -- settle, a little. One-handed adjustments to the crisp collars of his shirt, the perfect four-in-hand of his tie, the drape of his waistcoat. Light silk, rustling softly: the sunset’s gone and the night’s falling fast, but he knows the pattern in the back of the garment, the rich purples of the arrow-pattern, and the scattered white outlines of feathers. 

His own waistcoat is in green and black. The exact same pattern in the material, in its exact same weight. 

He leads Ignis into the cathedral proper, and it’s easy to find an unoccupied chapel-space to shelter in: here are the crumbling ledges that can be seat and table and places to perch all at once. 

Near the stone table: keyboards and a saxophone and a string quartet, and stepping up to join the people tuning the violins is a young woman with bleached-blond hair and electric-blue lipstick, her hands flying over turntables and the gleaming controls of a DJ’s console.

“Dance with me?” he asks, as soon as the music kicks in. The energetic bouncing cadences of swing music and the bone-deep beat of house music -- he’d never let the others know he’s into this kind of thing, logic and reason be damned. 

He’s wary, a little, of letting Ignis know he likes electro-swing -- but the frown’s falling off his face because Ignis is grinning wildly, is taking his hand, and before he can even blink they’re already careening through a series of rapidfire spiraling figures and -- “Who taught you?”

“Nyx!”

He has to laugh. “I should send him some wine!”

“He likes beer better,” Ignis says, breathless with the whirl of twirling him, “because he has no taste.”

Gladio laughs some more, and then it’s his turn to spin Ignis out into a spiraling turn and sidestep, and then the music crashes upwards in volume and tempo and he loses himself in the movements of their bodies, the starlight falling into Ignis’s eyes, the bright bubbled laugh that comes out of him when Gladio starts singing along to one of the tracks being layered into the swing-tune -- 

He dances until he’s breathless and Ignis keeps the beat with him every step of the way, and the stars are sparking sparkling from on high, caught in Ignis’s eyes --

He’s just kissing Ignis in the aftermath of a slowed-down track when the searchlights go out.

“Gladio.”

“It’s fine,” he says, and he pulls Ignis close. Turns him around so they’re standing back-to-front in the center of their own little dance floor. “Look up.”

“The stars are lovely.”

“Not like you though.”

That gets him a smack on his wrist and Gladio hides his grin against the back of Ignis’s neck. The lavender-wind, the jasmine on the breeze, caught in the fine strands of pale-brown hair -- 

Whistle-roar from very close by, and a tuft of rising smoke, too white and too visible in the sudden depths of the evening -- the smoke curls away and then --

Streaking flower-flame of light in the sky, and another, and another -- vivid spark, vivid colors crisscrossing in the sky, netting the stars in showers of flare and flash -- 

Under the cover of the explosions and the cheering he takes a deep breath and fumbles for the tiny little weight in his pocket -- 

“Love you,” he mutters, very very quietly, against the back of Ignis’s ear.

It’s not a surprise, not really, when the words make Ignis turn back around and look at him -- and the fireworks catch in the depths of his eyes, in the lines framing his smile. “I love you, Gladiolus.”

“Thought you wanted to watch the fireworks,” he teases, though he’s sweating a little, and the palm of his hand is damp, where he’s cupping something small and warming.

“I like watching you.”

And, really, what else can be said to that? What else can be done, except to lean in and kiss him, softly, and feel the jump of his pulse with every explosion, with every splash of fiery color against the night -- 

It’s now or never, Gladio thinks, and there’s no reason for him to lose his nerve: because here is Ignis in his arms, and he can taste the summer on his lips, feel the renewed beat of the music in his shoulders and in his chest.

Now or never: and he catches Ignis’s hand in his own. 

After all this: too short a time since meeting him, too long a time since they’d spoken to each other of falling hopelessly and ceaselessly and well, it’s almost too easy to pull the ring out of its box and to set it in its proper place, and the weight and the width of it fits into ink and figures as though it had always been there. As though it had been meant to be there from the very beginning.

Set in place, the ring seems caught and pinned on the dagger inked into the middle finger of Ignis’s left hand: the grip and the pommel and the cross-guard towards the joint, and the sharp point towards the knuckle. 

The final fiery blast of fireworks above them illuminates the shock and the joy of him. The tears, stray crystal-trails on his cheeks. The smile. The movement of his mouth. “How long?”

He thinks he knows what the question means, and he pulls Ignis close. “I couldn’t tell you. It just feels like I’ve been waiting forever to give you that ring.”

“And what does it mean exactly?” He leans in, willingly, because the words are punctuated with kisses.

“For you? It’s whatever you want it to be,” he says. Easier to answer, this. “For me: if you’ll let me be with you, I’ll be with you. However long it takes, whatever form it takes.”

He knows what the words mean and he feels them like they’re taking root inside him.

“Then I’ll be yours,” he hears Ignis say.

And the emotions in him flare up, brighter and more powerful than the night has been, and he can’t think of any way to improve on what’s already been said.

So he smiles, and opens his arms to Ignis, and says, “Yours.”


	7. gray skies blue skies

He starts up and almost out of his chair when he hears the heavy tread on the move, two pairs of incoming footsteps that have nowhere to go except -- straight to him, or perhaps straight for him, and Ignis hisses out a breath of protest as he jerks up from where he’s been hunched over his desk in the inner room of the tattoo shop -- pain like angry ravenous bolts radiating from his bent spine, from his pressed-on nerves, almost exploding in fireworks behind his left eye and he thinks he might almost fall out of his chair if not for the hard vise-like grip on his wrists, catching him, preventing him from keeling over.

“What the fuck, Scientia,” and the words are hard-edged, puncturing, very much like needles -- but the expression on Nyx’s face is oddly soft, and there’s nothing but unhappiness pulling the corner of his mouth down. “If you’re here like this tomorrow morning I am personally going to take you out back and, I don’t know, shoot you. Or something. What the hell did that boyfriend of yours do?”

And belatedly Ignis remembers that -- he hasn’t even told them about the trip, and that was only four days ago, and the problem with remembering fireworks, the austere and jagged beauty of a ruined cathedral, a promise that glints in wide gold around the middle finger of his left hand, is -- absence.

Not that Gladiolus had even wanted to leave: he’d gotten into -- three arguments that Ignis can remember, that Ignis was actually present for, icy-cold whispers over conference calls, and one actual shouting match: Gladiolus and two other voices on the side of the call that Ignis could hear, and all three of them had been overruled -- the memory of that still makes him wince in the here and now --

Over Nyx’s shoulder, Cor’s features turn into rock-like warning, a wordless promise of consequences --

“It’s -- not him, or it’s not his fault.” Ignis muffles some of the words in the palms of his hands, and hopes the other two pay attention to him anyway. “He didn’t want to leave. The others who work with him, they wanted him to be here, too. We have a lot to -- discuss, still, Gladiolus and I, and -- ” That’s when he tries to sit straight, and he lays his hands down onto the table, wiggling his left hand. “This. He gave me this when we went on vacation.”

“Figured that much out. Why isn’t he here?” he hears Cor ask. Quiet rasp, troublesome, vigilant.

“Company matters,” and Ignis sighs, again. Hates that he’s been sighing. 

“Well, shit, is this the part where I say I told you so?” He watches as Nyx hooks one of the other chairs with his boot, and turns it around so he can straddle it, arms draped over its back. “Articles of incorporation and shit. Answer’s still no, by the way.”

“We’ll never,” Ignis says, softly, after a moment. “And many’s the time I’ve thought of asking him to consider it. Breaking free of his. But -- that’s all but impossible.”

“Old money,” he hears Cor grunt, as he settles atop Nyx’s usual work table. “Family money. Inheritances.”

“More or less.”

“And you’re soon gonna be in the thick of it,” Nyx says. “If you aren’t already.”

“I’m not,” Ignis says. He has to get up or he’ll cramp up, and he hates fighting off those gnawing spasms, and there’s not much room to pace either. “I can’t recall how that happened.”

“Won’t have much of a choice if you decide to -- go through with that thing on your hand.” Whisper of leather jacket-sleeves, as Cor crosses his arms over his chest.

“I know,” he says, and he thinks of walking into the Amicitia offices only after hours. Kissing in deserted night-shadowed boardrooms. Glitzy cocktail parties that he’d only ever glimpsed, fidgeting on the outskirts and getting drunk on cheap beer afterwards. 

Maybe it means something, he thinks, that of all the people who might be connected to Gladiolus and his friends, he’s still only ever met Prompto: someone on the outside looking in, just like him.

And the thought makes him go hot and then cold and then he shivers, and grabs his battered jacket, and he’s halfway to running out of the shop before he can even register what he’s doing and he winces, leaving the other two without even a hint of explanation -- 

How can he go back? How can he go forward? 

_However long it takes, whatever form it takes._

He remembers those words and can’t, suddenly can’t make heads or tails of them -- somehow he’s crossing the city, he can’t even remember how he’d managed to get on the subway and the sway of the car, empty of its mid-morning shoppers, of students playing hooky, of the occasional bird or stray cat meandering across town, and when he gets out at a station his heart sinks all the way into his boots when he looks up and the Amicitia name is splashed onto the building across the huge four-way intersection.

He turns his back on it and -- 

Flash of flowers, weak wan sunlight glinting off a silver helmet striped in neon orange, and then the quiet thrum of a motorcycle pulling up next to him, bone-deep throb of it idling that feels like urgency, like rattling. “Hey, aren’t you -- ”

He looks, and the rider’s pulling away the helmet to free short hair and bright brown eyes, concern pulling at the lines of her face, silver-loop and a zipper holding her jacket closed. 

She’s familiar, but only because she has the same way of tilting her head that Gladiolus sometimes has, when he’s lost in thought. 

But she’s definitely stepping off the bike and holding her hand out to him. “Hi,” she says. “I really -- this is the last place I expected to find you, but then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Familiar, too, that voice, laced with steel-edges and bareknuckle strength. He’s heard the snap of her before. “I know you,” he says, softly. “I know your voice.”

“You probably do. Amicitia, Iris, nice to meet you in person,” she says.

Knitted gloves, fingerless and slouchy and red-threaded dark gray, sticking out of the sleeves of her leathers.

He takes her hand, gingerly, because he’s still shaking -- whether from nerves or from the pain of falling asleep the way he’s been doing for the past few nights, he can’t actually tell. “Ignis Scientia.”

“I know who you are, and I know about that ring of yours,” Iris says, but she sounds kind and gentle and also a little too sharp, keen and incisive like she’s planning to analyze him somehow, read him like a book. “Are you all right?”

He considers: and he chooses to tell her the truth, and he shakes his head.

Braces himself for her response.

He’s not expecting her to sigh. “Every year this happens. Every year they want to talk to him. I don’t get them and they’re idiots but we can’t dump them and -- I’m sorry,” she says, suddenly. “Honestly I am.”

He blinks at her. “Whatever for? What did you do to me?”

“I’m here,” she says. “Not Gladio’s job to deal with the suppliers. That’s mine. And he’s off shaking their hands and all that. He needs to be here, and not -- everywhere else.”

“I don’t mean to depend on him,” he says, quietly, slowly. “I would never wish to depend on him.”

“Didn’t say anything about that: but my brother gave you a ring, and that was a recent thing, right,” is her response, a little on the tart side. “And he should be here talking to you about it. He should be here so you can ask him questions.”

“He didn’t even make it back to his apartment,” Ignis says, then. “I waited at the airport with him. He caught a connecting flight to -- I have no idea, honestly, where he was going.”

“I have his itinerary, I don’t want to look at it,” he hears her say. “I -- I guess we were supposed to meet, anyway, you and me, here. I’m not Gladio, but -- knowing what he did, knowing he’d rather be here -- ”

“He tells me that every night,” Ignis mutters.

“I imagine he does,” and Iris sounds a little gentler, now, even as she gets back on the motorcycle. Even as she offers him her helmet. “Come on. Let’s not talk here. My place is a couple of blocks that way,” and she points past the intersection. “Or tell me where you’d rather be comfortable. Tell me to fuck off, even, we don’t have to do this now, but you look like you could use some company.”

“I don’t know,” he says, but he takes pillion and hangs on, and she takes off before he can change his mind, and it feels like only a moment before she’s pulling into an underground parking area and tapping a keycard to an elevator call panel.

And where Gladiolus lives in -- sleek modern spaces, the loft and the majestic sweep of skylines, the constant murmur of a television programmed to cycle through an entire series of satellite-TV channels with stock-market tickers, Iris lives in -- a colorful, cramped flat.

Which is still on the top floor of a high-rise building, with an upscale shopping center in the basement and a famous nightclub on the fourth floor, but she pulls off her boots and her leathers and stashes them in a slouch of a basket next to her front door, and she holds her hand out for the helmet and he passes that over, too.

Blankets and cushions in clashing stripes piled on every surface he can see, and -- behind glass -- two collections, softly illuminated. One is of ballet dancers in delicate watercolors and porcelain; the other is of -- cacti? Dancing cacti? -- in sealed blister packs.

“Coffee? Tea?” he hears Iris say, suddenly. “I don’t mind offering you something stronger, either.”

He tears his gaze away from the figures. Looks at Iris, who is tilting her head at him again, her hands hovering over a dozen mismatched cups on a black tray. 

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he says, lowering himself into a chair. 

“You’re better at that than he is, anyway,” he adds, and then the kitchen fills with a roasted-grain scent, oddly comforting. The tea that she pours into a cup for him is a rich red-brown, and it leaves the taste of baked crackers on his tongue.

“We didn’t say anything about getting married.” The words spring out of him, suddenly, like relief. 

“Thank you for trusting me with that,” is her response. “And -- well, actually, thank you, in general, Ignis.”

He blinks at her, wordlessly.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she says, and she laughs, only a little, and it’s a brittle sound and he has the thought of wanting to reach out to her, to clasp her shoulder. 

“You know what you did, what you do,” Iris continues, after another sip of tea. “You make my brother happy. You give him something that looks like stability. Sure he chases you around some. I thought he was kidding, he said he found someone with a weirder schedule than his and -- well, if you’re here in the middle of the morning maybe I should believe him.” She makes a little sound, like air puffing out of her mouth. “I like your work, by the way. I saw what you did to Gladio. It’s good stuff.”

“Thank you,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

And after a while Iris sighs, and sets her teacup aside, and points to his left hand. “I hate that I have to be the one to tell you this. I hate that Gladio’s not here because he should be here to tell you what that ring means. I mean, this is a thing between you and him and no one else except -- except my parents.”

He stares at her and tries to understand the words. “Your parents.”

“You know they’re dead.”

“Yes,” he says, and doesn’t tell her about a meeting in a coffee shop, in the middle of a summer storm, with the struggling sunlight catching on mourning jewelry. 

“You’re wearing their wedding rings,” she says, plain and simple and factual.

“Oh,” he says, after a long moment. 

He turns his hand, and stares at his ring, and cups his other hand over it.

“You going to be worried about it?”

He looks her in the eyes. “Do I need to be?”

Chuckle, warm, and she gets back to her feet and he watches her dig in one of the cupboards, and pull out a scuffed-up red tin. “Just don’t lose it, is all,” she says.

Waft of cinnamon and sugar from the tin, and he gratefully accepts the star-shape that she holds out to him, still in its paper cup. 

“I do have a question,” he says, after he’s had a third cookie, after she’s poured herself another cup of tea. 

“Yes?”

“You never wanted to keep these?”

“We don’t use rings, my person and I,” and she laughs, a little, and bites into another cookie, her fingertips already crusted with sugar. “We’re not interested in jewelry period. I’m just happy the rings are actually going to get used.”

“Fair enough,” he says. 

“You planning to get my brother a ring too?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.” He runs his hands through his hair, this time. “Unless you think it’s far too soon for me to be considering it.”

“That’s none of my business, is it? But -- maybe you two need to talk about it.”

“We try,” he says, and if he groans, he does so quietly. “At least we can talk, most of the time. This trip of his has -- gotten in the way.”

He watches her roll her eyes. “Tell me about it. People are idiots.”

“Many of them are,” he says, and for some reason she’s calm, and so he can feel calm too.

And he says, “Perhaps we could do this again.”

“Not perhaps,” and he can’t help but return her smile. “We should. I’m not asking to be your friend. But -- we can’t be strangers, you and I, can we? And -- at the very least, you probably have to meet Talcott.”

“Your -- person,” he says.

“Yup.”

“I’d like that.” He thinks, and reaches for his smartphone -- it’s a miracle he’s got it on him at all, with his earlier hasty exit -- and he offers it to her. “Your number, please.”

“Give me a buzz so I get your details too,” she says, and it’s easy to do so, one-handed -- he pours more tea for her, at the same time.

And then his phone chimes, and the message is from a familiar sender: 

_Are you all right?_

_I’ve been better,_ is what he sends back. _I met Iris today._

_She better be looking after you._

_I’ll settle for -- maybe being her friend._

_Tell me all about it when I get home? If I’m lucky they’ll let me go tonight, and I’ll be home in time for dinner tomorrow._

And he sends back, _I will. I’ll be here._


	8. storm-colored night (finale)

The floor beneath his feet is finally starting to warm up as he paces another round, as he passes the windows once again, and he’s high enough up here that the storm’s nothing more than a tattered voice, a ragged remnant. Raindrops hurled this way and that on the moan of the wind in its changing directions, restless as the edge on his thoughts, and he’s here, and he’s not supposed to be here, because he’s supposed to be hurrying off to another round of meetings, a whirlwind tour of several branch companies and the one that’s just broken ground on a sleek new office tower.

The storm means he’s stuck here, though, and he’s not fool enough to charter a private flight. The last thing he wants is to put other people in danger for no actual reason, and he can only imagine the kind of scolding he’ll get from Iris, from Talcott, from all of the others combined, if he’d been so thoughtless.

Maybe he’d have tried it, though, and told Ignis -- and only Ignis, if it meant he’d get to hear his voice -- but the same storm that’s left him stranded and unable to leave, is the same storm that’s left Ignis stranded and unable to come home, his incoming flight diverted if not grounded altogether, and that makes tonight a week since they’ve been in the same places. 

A week since Ignis has gone off to attend an arts festival.

He thinks of the festival and its satellite events and -- he still wants to go, irrationally, even though he’d spent part of the previous night watching a roundup of the closing ceremonies. A brief speech by one of the organizers, a series of final bows on a makeshift stage, and -- tacked on hastily at the end -- a dizzying pass through the music and the bass-beat and the neon-stained air of a dance party.

He can still see, clearly, the camera panning around Ignis’s friends Cor and Nyx -- and the glimpse of Ignis himself, laughing with a bottle of beer in hand, and the bright light sparking in a thousand colors off his ring.

It’s enough -- it will have to be enough -- and Gladio swallows around the lump in his throat. Words that he still wants to say, inadequate and belated though they might be.

But what else is there to say? He’d had that conversation with Ignis in this very loft, right next to the front door -- he might be standing in the same spot, he thinks, the spot where he’d sat down and Ignis had settled carefully beside him, half-sitting and half-kneeling and shoulders fixed in an easy straight line. 

“Nothing’s easy with me,” he’d said. “Ask Iris and Talcott. Ask the others. I can’t even always have time for myself. How can I have time for you? I’ll always be snatching at what I can get. Will that be enough for you? Can that be enough for you?”

“I don’t want to lose you. Or us. Or this,” Ignis had replied. His hands had been so warm around Gladio’s own. “I refuse to give you up.”

“I won’t give you up either. I won’t. But -- there’s all this between us. My life and yours.”

He’d all but lost himself in a searing, sweet kiss. “Yes. My life and yours. We might as well be on different planes of existence, sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I make you feel that way -- ”

“Hush. No, Gladiolus. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I see you, and I think I know you, a little -- ”

“More than a little,” and he’d returned the kiss. “You know me. You see me.”

That had gotten him a smile. “And that is why I know that it isn’t your fault. It has nothing to do with a fault of yours; it has everything to do with everyone else around you. Not your friends. Not your family. But it’s how you lead. It’s how you deal with the people who help you run your company, your companies. You need to be with them, and they need to see you. I can’t resent them, or indeed you, for that.”

“Maybe you should, though, if it keeps taking me away from you -- ”

“Well, I can always go back to being rootless,” and Ignis had laughed, but only for a moment. “No. Forget that I said that. I have done my time, I have done my wandering, and I cannot find any more comfort in it. I want inspiration but I also want to put down roots and -- for better or for worse, perhaps it’s you I need to put down those roots with.”

“And that’s the best thing you’ve ever said to me -- one more entry for the list -- but, Ignis, how can you do that? When I can’t -- ”

“Do you have to keep thinking about what you can’t do?” Ignis had asked, and Gladio’d heard the stern note that must have been in his voice all along, then. “That doesn’t sound like the you that I know.”

“Then what are we talking about?”

And Ignis had tilted his head, and said, very gently, “What is it that you _can_ do, for yourself, for your family, for the people who are important to you? What is it that you can do, to deal with all the things that weigh on you?”

He’d stared at Ignis, caught completely off-guard, completely lost for words. 

He’s still quiet now, but that’s because he’s been talking to -- Iris and Talcott and all the rest, Noctis and Lunafreya and Aranea, and -- now he’s supposed to be including a few new points of discussion when he starts this latest round of meetings that he can’t head to, not right now, and -- again he starts pacing and it’s a total shock when the chimes go off.

Door, opening, and before he can double back the long tall shadow of Ignis is filling that narrow space, slumped over, husk of his words as he comes in, sounding like a faint idea of hope: “You’re here?”

“How can I go anywhere? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a storm out there,” he says, hurrying forward, irrationally comforted by the sudden presence of that vital warmth within his arms -- inked lines, piercings in an arc, eyeglasses knocked half-askew, the brackish fug of old bad coffee -- as he all but sweeps Ignis off his feet, and half-carries him to the couch. “Which is why I have no idea why you’re here. You can’t tell me you flew home.”

“I can’t tell you that,” he hears Ignis say, “because I did not. I drove, and please don’t ask me to do that again, not soon, not any time.”

He has to stare. There are entirely new lines of pain in Ignis’s face, and that they’re shallow and probably, maybe -- he hopes -- temporary, is a scant comfort. His sleeves are crumpled into softness and his hair has fallen into his face, and his cheeks are alight, far too warm, in a way that makes Gladio’s heart twist with thoughts of fever, of fatigue. 

For Ignis’s sake, he doesn’t raise his voice -- but he has to ask. “Then why did you -- ”

The couch creaks, and there’s a hand on his chest, quelling.

Slow, slow, strange pained wince in Ignis’s movements as he gets up and -- curls himself into Gladio’s lap. There’s no other word for the entire length of his frame, contorting, knees coming up and feet splayed out, and his cheek comes to rest against Gladio’s collar bone and he breathes like he’s forcing himself into a new rhythm, like he’s forcing himself into slowing down.

It’s not difficult at all to wrap himself around those unsteady shoulders, those cold bare feet, the angles and lines of Ignis. Not difficult to scatter kisses into his hair, despite the smell of dust that clings to him, of dry air, of climate control and the lingering electrified tingle of the storm-lashed night. Not difficult to hold on to the back of his neck, to the dip of his waist. 

Ignis’s arms around him, the shiver slowly falling away, and Gladio doesn’t want to ask, but he worries, and so: “Drove?”

“Yes. I have been driving for -- the past ten hours.”

“Why, Ignis, why.”

“I needed to get home.”

That makes something twinge in his chest and he can’t honestly tell what it is: because it’s almost sharp, it’s almost painful, but it’s the kind of pain that he wants to hold on to because it’s more than just a reminder of emotions, of quiet words that ring like promises. Something like a memory of the smell of gunpowder in a summer’s-end night. “Please tell me you got out of the way of the storm, at the least.”

“That was why it was a ten-hour drive. I skirted the edges of it. If I had truly wanted to be reckless I would have been here hours ago, but perhaps you would not have thanked me for doing something so purely foolish. I wanted to be here sooner, I wanted to catch you because I was certain you would be leaving tonight, storm or no storm.” Catch in Ignis’s breathing. “I didn’t want to come back to -- an empty house.”

The catch is somewhere in Gladio’s own heart, now, as he tries to press Ignis closer, tries to find the rest of the spaces between them so he can close them, and keep Ignis somewhere near him, touching him, curled into him as he is now.

“I can’t leave. Airport’s closed.”

“As I heard. And that only made me more determined to get here.”

“I’m just glad you didn’t kill yourself. Please don’t do that again, or at least don’t attempt it without me.”

Soft huff of breath, that isn’t laughter. Just a weary sound. “I said. I don’t want to do it ever again.”

So he murmurs nonsense into Ignis’s ear, and tries to listen for his heartbeat, and -- 

“No one’s ever done anything like that for me before,” he hears himself say.

“I’ve never wanted to do anything like that before. But -- it was a long week, and I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d stepped out of line, talking to you the way I did, before I left. I had to come back, as quickly as I could -- ”

He almost shakes Ignis; he thinks better of it at the last second, and he snorts instead. “You do know I get scolded by people like Iris on a regular basis. By people like Lunafreya. That woman knows how to put people in their place, believe me, and when she lets me have it I can’t look her in the eye for a day.

“So don’t think you were doing anything like that. You were talking to me; we were having a conversation. And maybe I needed you to ask me some really hard questions.”

“I don’t want to interfere in those other parts of your life, just for the sake of what we have.”

“So you’ll just let yourself be inconvenienced instead?” he asks, gently, and he’s rocking Ignis from side to side, now, and the couch creaks in a comforting rhythm beneath his movements. “Not going to let that happen. Not if there’s something I can do about it.”

The storm gasps, dying, beyond the windows.

“About that,” he hears Ignis say, like he’s too careful when he speaks.

So he tips Ignis’s face up with a fingertip beneath his chin, and says, “Thank you, by the way.”

“I didn’t do anything -- I was going to apologize -- ”

“You can apologize if you like, and I’ll say I forgive you, but honestly, I don’t know what we’d be doing it for,” he says, gently.

“I just said that I didn’t want to interfere in your life and -- I still tried to. Well-meaning or not.”

“And if I say it again -- if I said that I needed you to, then -- will you let it go? Because you didn’t interfere. You helped me, and you maybe helped some other people because of it, and -- that’s pretty much the opposite of interfering, isn’t it.”

He feels Ignis sit up, just a little bit, and then he can’t help but wince because there’s a sudden pain shooting through his hip.

“Perhaps we’d do better to have this conversation someplace more comfortable,” is what comes out of Ignis’s mouth, instead of whatever else he’d been meaning to say.

“Good idea,” and he crosses the loft and heads slowly up the stairs, and the bed has never looked more welcoming, even when it smells like the rain, even when all the layers of blanket and sheet and duvet are cold and take time to warm up.

At least he can bundle Ignis into the pillows, and at least he can fit himself into Ignis’s side. 

“I think you took all my words away,” is what he does hear, after a while.

He looks up from kissing Ignis’s shoulder. “So -- what else is there to talk about?”

“I only have one more question.”

“Yes?”

He feels it when Ignis turns his head, and he feels it when Ignis kisses the top of his head, and he almost asks for another one.

But Ignis says, “Do you want to wear a ring?” and the night, the storm, the world, stops for just a moment.

Only for that, because then he’s smiling into Ignis’s arm and saying, “What do you think? Yes I do. I really do.”

He feels like he could fly, suddenly. Like he could lift right off the earth all on his own power. 

“Then you’ll have it when you get back.”

He doesn’t even think about -- what the ring could be. Metal on his finger, or ink, or whatever else Ignis might have in mind. 

That’s not the idea that fills his mind.

All he wants, all he’s ever wanted, and Ignis has simply offered it, in a quiet and gentle way that far outweighs any storm.

Shift on the bed that warns him of movement and -- he’s smiling up into Ignis’s eyes, and he’s fearless and sure, and the kiss that they share is a world of its own.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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